What is the Difference Between Local SEO and SEO?

While traditional SEO focuses on improving your site's visibility on a national or global scale, local SEO allows you to capture local search territory to connect with search engines in your area. SEO and local SEO use many of the same strategies. The main difference between organic and local search is that local SEO has a geographic component. Local search engine optimization is a subsection of this that focuses on the geographic components of search. Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for local search results, which can not only increase visibility and traffic to your site, but also foot traffic to your physical business.

Organic SEO is used by websites that may or may not have a geographic location. It may be influenced by location, but it is definitely not tied to a traditional business, the results of Pure Organic are a mix of businesses, articles, blogs, news, social media profiles, etc. Organic search and results are totally independent of locations. On the other hand, local SEO is essentially linked to and associated with a physical business and necessarily has a geographic component. For example, if someone searches for a 'car service in Pasadena', the search engines would get, that the user wants a local business in Pasadena, that can service their cars.

Therefore, here search engines search for reliable and relevant businesses that provide car service in the user's locations. The good news is that up to one-third of all reviewers would be willing to change a negative opinion to a neutral or positive opinion if they receive a professional and empathetic response from the company. The bad news is that nearly 6 out of 10 local businesses do not yet have a reputation management strategy in place. Optimizing on-page content means thinking about things like title tags, meta descriptions, H1s vs. H2s, keyword density, internal links and more.

If those concepts aren't familiar, here's a refresher on writing SEO. Domain authority (or DA) is a metric developed by Moz that predicts the likelihood that a website will rank in the SERP. Domain authority scores range from 0 to 100, with the most authoritative sites having the highest authority. In local SEO, there is a geographical limit, while enterprise SEO is not a physical business. Local SEO is associated with a business, which is physically present for customers, but when doing business SEO, there is no such limit of geographical boundaries.

User location is taken into account when it comes to local SEO. Local SEO is simply the practice of generating reliable and relevant signals in specific locations. By improving local visibility, you can begin to develop your expertise or authority at a smaller local level. On the other hand, if you have a company that sells its products or provides its services only in a particular geographic area, then local SEO is what you need. One of the purposes of SEO is to target a specific audience, so if the company is local, the audience will also be local. Before we get into the difference between organic and local SEO strategies, let's give a quick summary (for more information see RankWatch's learning section).

Local SEO helps your business grow and drives more online traffic through leads by improving your website's visibility in specific locations. But there are also unique elements to local SEO such as citations (NAP consistency) and review signals which are important for any successful strategy. The fact is that local search queries (“near me” searches) are more relevant than ever: about 53% of all searches on Google include a local reference. In fact, the discipline of SEO is less about “doing SEO” and more on creating amazing content that adds value for people. Consistent NAP appointments and an effective reputation management plan are important parts of any holistic approach to local SEO. When done correctly both organic and local SEO efforts will help improve your website's ranking but when done incorrectly both can have very detrimental effects on your digital marketing efforts.

In other words, local keywords help Google include your business in local searches making it more likely that people in your area will learn about your business. For any successful SEO strategy you should always implement technical SEO on-page and off-page optimization techniques to get the most out of your website and see the best results. Some examples that could be used in any local SEO campaign include “florists in Pasadena” “divorce lawyers in California” “dog walkers in Los Angeles” etc. But how does local search differ from regular organic search and what does this mean for both your organic and local SEO strategies?.

Claudette Lorenzo
Claudette Lorenzo

General social media junkie. Devoted pop culture scholar. Wannabe bacon enthusiast. Subtly charming tea fanatic. Freelance foodaholic. Lifelong twitter enthusiast.